The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist funerary text written to serve as a guide through the afterlife from death to rebirth, is examined. Included: comments by the Dalai Lama; and Tibet scholar Robert Thurman (Columbia University).

The true story of Christopher Columbus was not only one of victorious discovery; it was also marked by disaster, accusation, and betrayal. Ten short years after his discovery of the New World, Columbus languished in a Caribbean prison. There, awaiting the gallows, he plotted what he called his most treacherous voyage–one that ended with the loss of all four of his ships and left Columbus and his crew shipwrecked with little hope of survival.

He fired cannon on his own countrymen, wooed the mistress of a formidable opponent and even threatened the Pope. He was Napoleon, one of the most brilliant and complex figures in history. This absorbing appraisal of his life offers a new perspective of the little man from Corsica, who rose to new heights of power by seizing every brutal, outrageous opportunity in his path. In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte, a native of Corsica, crowned himself emperor of France, an audacious gesture that illustrated his overweening pride and ruthless ambition.

Mankind The Story of All of Us is an epic 12-hour television event about the greatest adventure of all time—the history of the human race. It takes 10 billion years for the ideal planet to form and 3 billion more for the right conditions to emerge before it finally happens: mankind begins. From there unfolds a fast-paced story told here through key turning points—stepping stones in our journey from hunter-gatherer to global citizen. It’s a tale of connections—why some ideas take hold and spread around the globe, and how the lives of people in one part of the world are shaped by events in another.

Lyndon Baines Johnson passed some of the most important civil rights legislation of the 1960s that still affects Americans today. Discover how he used the power of the presidency to strike deals, make trades and form an alliance with Martin Luther King Jr. to bring civil rights to the forefront of American politics.

This captivating documentary from the History Channel recounts the development of iconic physicist Albert Einstein's provocative theory of general relativity. Some 200 years after the introduction of Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation, Einstein rocked the science community with his theory, which suggests that gravity is a warping of space-time caused by the presence of matter.